There’s a myth that the era of free music and nightlong jams is a thing of the past. But that’s all it is: a myth, its lie proven every time an all-night MC freestyle battle rocks a warehouse or musicians both professional and amateur sit around a campfire at a bluegrass music festival. It’s this communal spirit that show organizer Eric Burman has fostered during the 17 years he has organized bluegrass festivals around Northern California.
Articles by Paul M. Davis
Morning Benders Go Long
One of the truisms of the Internet era is that the traditional album is dead: thanks to iTunes, piracy and mp3 blogs, we’ve become a singles-crazed culture without the patience for a sustained 60-minute listening experience. Sales figures bear this theory out. Nevertheless, many artists continue to quixotically advocate for the album form, presenting cohesive sets of songs that can only be truly appreciated as a whole.
Santa Cruz AIDS Ride Afterparty A Blowout
Over the past decade, the Surf City AIDS Ride has raised more than $100,000 for the Santa Cruz AIDS Project, thanks to bicyclists willing to submit themselves to impressive 30-, 60- or 100-mile treks around the county. It’s a journey that offers its own rewards, but this year there will be something a little extra at the finish line—a music festival that brings together some of the city’s brightest musical talents.
Chanteuse Emily Jane White Returns to Santa Cruz
There’s a unique confidence to Emily Jane White’s songwriting: it’s at once sympathetic and tough-minded, reflective and unsentimental. Her work has been described as folk, which is reductive, considering how orchestrated her full-band arrangements are. While the music creates a contemplative space reminiscent of folk music, White’s subject matter and musical touchstones transcend the woman-with-acoustic-guitar label that is inevitably applied to women with acoustic guitars, whether or not it fits.
Ben Harper, Buddy Guy at Santa Cruz Blues Fest
Santa Cruz’s most venerable music institution, the Santa Cruz Blues Festival, returns to town this Memorial Day with a stellar lineup worthy of an 18th birthday party. Under the guiding hand of festival organizer Bill Welch, the festival pays tribute to the both the foundation and the future of the genre with Saturday headliners Ben Harper and the Relentless7 and on Sunday Buddy Guy, who stands as a one-man institution in his own right.
Santa Cruz’s Sound and Fury
PUTTING a retrospective of the Santa Cruz music scene into print is probably asking for trouble. After accepting this assignment, I posted a one-line status update to Facebook: “writing a roundup of Santa Cruz’s most significant bands of the decade. Suggestions?” It didn’t take long for the responses to start coming in. “There have been significant Santa Cruz bands since Camper Van Beethoven?” wrote one local, illustrating the foolhardiness of trying to present a single overview of a decade of Santa Cruz music. For every resident who thinks the local music scene ended in the early ’80s when CVB signed to a major and left town, there’s a grubby teenager in a Soquel garage blasting through two-minute punk songs who has never heard of David Lowery. With slide show.
In Defense of Slow Reading
Has the relentless cacophony of Google culture made us dumb? An Internet junkie picks up a book and finds out.
